This test has become multiple choice.
And no one is shading in the baby’s voice.
So I will speak as one helpless and weak.
Let me help walk you through the weeks.
One, your egg and his sperm kiss.
Two, from this union emerges a fertilized egg that divides into multiple cells, dances down your fallopian tubes, and shimmies into your uterine lining.
Three, a microscopic ball of hundreds of cells develops into me and tells your body to stop producing eggs because I’m here.
Four, I am now an embryo. You are four weeks from your last period and I am the size of a poppy seed. Period.
Week five. My heart is beating. I said my heart is beating. I am nothing short of miraculous in a world of materialists that don’t believe in miracles.
As a matter of fact, when the fact that I am imago Dei comes up, they change the subject matter. They say my life doesn’t matter. Make it a laughing matter or a personal matter, when for me, this is a matter of life or death. When faced with other challenges, you’re told mind over matter, but treat me like fecal matter to be excreted.
Make an enemy of my mommy. And disposing of me becomes her superpower. Convincing you that I deserve the death sentence despite having committed no crime. What injustice that a fetus is not considered human life if the mother doesn’t want it. But it magically becomes a baby the moment she does. Fickle human beings playing God.
A judge. Determining who deserves value like whomever passed on this idea that clusters of cells that are not living when cells are the basic structural and functional units of life, when a human body is a mosaic made up of cells and killing a pregnant woman is double homicide and will land you in a cell. What hypocrisy.
When you make confetti of me, watch my body explode in the womb while you celebrate my execution. When I am innocent, a child, not merely a clump of cells, an embodiment of divine thought, mysteriously crocheted in the womb. No cap. Crafted and formed in the image of God, the God you pretend to be when you dispose of me.
But I am God-breathed. He sees my unformed body, made this matter, matter. And the fact that I need you to survive doesn’t make me less human. It proves that I am human.
Don’t think that your survival was all you. You needed help, too, to get out. But you don’t want me to get out? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Destroying me is not your only option. Ninety-five percent of the time I’m terminated, not because of rape, incest, or health challenges, but because I’m considered the challenge.
I’m the challenge to be avoided. A mere birth to be controlled, parts to be sold, to be silenced, to be suffocated in my home.
When the womb becomes a war zone, and I’m getting got for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, even though this is where I’m supposed to be.
And I’m just praying one day we will agree, and I’ll come out unscathed in all my dignity. Maybe then you’ll see yourself in me.